ebooks

Healthcare evidence and knowledge now a simple search away

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A new NHS Knowledge and Library Hub (the ‘Hub’), coordinated by Health Education England (HEE) and NHS librarians, now makes it easier to find journal articles and other evidence resources across NHS England.

The Hub is a ‘one-stop’ gateway which, for the first time nationally, connects NHS staff and learners in England seamlessly to articles, reports and other evidence-based resources all in one place.

You can access and search the Hub at https://bit.ly/NHSKLH, and sign-in with your NHS OpenAthens username and password to take full advantage of time-saving benefits, including:

  • Cross-searching across a wide range of databases to locate journal articles and e-publications such as reports and conference proceedings
  • One click access to PDFS where available, or request a copy via our NHS Article Request service
  • Searches that can be carried across to clinical decision support tools such as Uptodate, BMJ Best Practice or the Royal Marsden Manual and even selected e-books
  • Access to individual databases such as Medline, CINAHL and Embase for advanced literature searching
  • A national NHS system available to you wherever you work in NHS England via your NHS OpenAthens account, connecting you to library services such as our NHS Articles Request Service.

Try a search today or learn more about how to make the most of the ‘Hub’ with our short user guide.

The Hub is an exciting new HEE initiative, designed with all NHS staff  and learners in mind- please send any queries or feedback on the ‘Hub’ to liaison@sgul.ac.uk, so we can keep working with our providers to enhance and improve this new service.

If you have any questions, please contact Karen John-Pierre, NHS and Liaison Manager at St George’s Library on kjohn@sgul.ac.uk

Kortext ebooks NHS collection

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Health Education England (HEE) has invested in a collection of ebooks for NHS staff, now available through Kortext.

The collection of ebooks covers subject areas including key clinical topics, nursing and healthcare management, alongside titles on critical appraisal, mentoring and revision resources for medical exams.

To access the books, go directly to the Kortext website: https://app.kortext.com, select St George’s University Hospitals NHS Trust from the list of institutions and enter your OpenAthens details. You will also find a link to Kortext in ‘My Resources‘ when you log into your OpenAthens account.

On the landing page of the site, click on Collections to view the full list of ebooks. Selecting an available title will add it to Books, which is your personal bookshelf. Books that you open will remain on your bookshelf for the duration of their loan period.

Kortext offers accessiblity options which allow you to change the formatting of a book, including options for the background colour, the font and the size of the text. When reading a book, make use of the options to take notes, highlight content, bookmark pages or print – all notes, highlights and bookmarks are saved in your account.

If you wish to read offline, create a personal Kortext account and download the app; Kortext apps are available for Mac, Windows, iOS and Android.

Example titles:

Bailey & Love’s Essential Clinical Anatomy

Care of the Cancer Patient

Children and Young People’s Nursing Skills at a Glance

Essentials of Management for Healthcare Professionals

Essential knowledge and skills for healthcare assistants

Medical Statistics at a Glance

Patient-Centred Ethics and Communication at the End of Life

Research Methodologies for Beginners

Supervision in Clinical Practice : A Practitioner’s Guide

The doctor’s guide to critical appraisal

The Foundation Programme for Doctors

The textbook of non-medical prescribing

This collection is an addition to those ebooks which are already available from St George’s Library, and which can be accessed through Hunter.

If you need to create an OpenAthens account, or have forgotten your password, visit: https://openathens.nice.org.uk/. Contact liaison@sgul.ac.uk with any questions.

DawsonERA ebook platform closes on 31st July.

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As announced in an earlier post, one of our main e-books suppliers, Dawson’s has gone into administration. The service will be closing down on 31st July. If you use DawsonERA e-books via Hunter & you have saved notes, highlights etc. within any titles, make sure you download these annotations before the 31st July. Rest assured, we have plans in place to move most of the Dawson’s content over to our other main e-books supplier, Ebook Central. Any questions? Email: liaison@sgul.ac.uk

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Libraries Week 2019: Celebrating our Content and Digital Infrastructure team

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Libraries Week takes place between 7th – 12th October 2019. This year’s campaign is focused on celebrating the role of libraries in the digital world. Over the course of the week we’ll be introducing you to different teams within the Library and explore how they use technology to support our community.

Today’s post features a contribution from our Content and Digital Infrastructure Team and will be highlighting what goes on behind the scenes to facilitate user access to our physical and digital resources.

In terms of connecting our library users to content, digital has transformed the parameters of our service and brought many benefits to our users, but with it has also come additional complexities and challenges. The Content and Digital Infrastructure team work together closely to meet these challenges and facilitate the opportunities offered by digital innovations to better meet the information needs of our users.

Meet the team

Lawrence Jones, our Content and Digital Infrastructure Manager, oversees the library’s activities in this area and has particular responsibility for systems such as our Library Management System and our library search tool Hunter – these integrated systems enable all the core activities around the library from access to the library space itself through to finding and accessing articles online.

Clementina Sanchez, our Acquisitions Librarian, supported by Georgina Coles, Information Assistant – takes care of the purchase, processing and cataloguing of books and e-books to ensure our book stock is kept current and in good condition – ready for when you need it!

Verity Allison, our Journals and E-resources Librarian, supported by Hilary Garrett, Information Assistant – manages the journals that the library subscribes to along with other specialist e-resources such as healthcare databases like Medline, and audio-visual resources such as Acland’s Video Atlas of Human Anatomy.

Interlibrary Loans Team – AKA Jane Appleton and Hilary Garrett, Information Assistants, locate books and articles from outside our collections on those occasions when we just don’t have the item you’re after.

Further information about using our resources can be found on the Using the Library webpages and on our  Help with Library Resources webpages.

How do we use technology to support our users?

Using the benefits of digital to enhance our physical services

The move from print to electronic journals has had a fairly dramatic impact on the physical layout of the library. With most journal subscriptions now online, we no longer require the rows and rows of shelving to accommodate print copies and can offer far more study spaces, which is of real benefit to our users today. The slideshow below shows before/after images of our silent study section after our last refurbishment:

In addition to this, recent upgrades to our Library Management System, Entry Gates and the installation of RFID self-service machines have made it easier than ever for our library users to self-manage their library accounts and borrowing activities, enabling the library to offer extended 24-hour opening. As long as users have their ID/Library access card with them they can access study spaces in the libraries and computer rooms 24 hours a day, borrow and return books throughout the day or night. Given the 24-hour nature of healthcare this facilitates better access for both our students and NHS trust users, as access to the library and our resources can be accommodated around any shift or study pattern.

To further support continuity of access for our users, our collection development policy supports where possible the purchase of e-book copies in supplement to print copies for reading list materials – so even if a physical copy of the book is not available, or if you are unable to be onsite, the content remains available.

Using the benefits of digital to enhance online access

The Library now manages access to thousands of journal titles, far in excess of what we ever could have accommodated physically in print, giving staff and students at St George’s access to far more content than before, with the added convenience that in most cases it can be accessed from anywhere and at any time.

However, with online journals the Library typically licenses the content for a specific period of time, whereas with print journals we owned the volumes and issues of the journals we purchased. The Journals and e-resources team negotiate the terms and conditions of these licences with our suppliers each year, making these transactions far more complex, but giving us the opportunity to ensure the licence enables us to use the content in ways that meet our needs in the ever changing Digital context. For example, in recent years we have seen improvements in licence terms around the use of content in VLEs (Virtual Learning Environments – such as Canvas, used at St George’s, University of London) to better support teaching and learning, and improvement in terms around data-mining to support research activities.

Supporting access to online subscriptions also requires maintaining a number of key systems, such as our link resolver, in addition to the more conventional library catalogue – which is also completely digital these days. The upgrades to our Library Management System and Library Search Tool – Hunter, implemented over the last two years have now integrated the functionality of the library catalogue and link resolver in to a single search tool, Hunter, enabling users to search in one place for books, journals, articles and more with live holdings information for all books and links through to the full text of articles that we have access to. These full text links are also integrated in to our other healthcare databases, and popular free tools such as Google Scholar (some set-up steps required, see below) and PubMed – look for the ‘Find it @ SGUL’ links to check for availability via St George’s Library.

Get connected, get creative and learn new skills

Use our library search tool Hunter– it is designed to search on material that St George’s University of London owns/subscribes to, focusing your search on the high-quality information resources selected by St George’s academics, researchers and librarians that you will be able to access with your university login.

Set up ‘Find it @ SGUL’ links in Google Scholar – for easier access to the full text of your search results where available via St George’s Library:

  1. Click on the menu at the top left of the Google Scholar home page
  2. Select ‘Settings’
  3. Select ‘Library links’
  4. Search for ‘st george’
  5. Select ‘St George’s University of London’
  6. Click Save

Bookmark the Library’s PubMed link: this link is customised to our holdings so that you will see ‘Find it @ SGUL’ links in for your PubMed search results, giving you easier access to the full text where available via St George’s Library.

Check for access via your local library:

At St George’s Library we manage a highly specialist collection – occasionally we get requests for resources which are just too general for our service but these can often be accessed for free via your local library. Wandsworth Libraries provide online access to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Oxford Dictionaries Online, and Press Reader (offers instant access to over 4000 newspapers and magazines) and more…why not register online today?

Need help?

We can provide help and support in person from the Library’s Helpdesk and Research Enquiries Desk, or if you have a query for a specific member of the team contact us on journals@sgul.ac.uk

We look forward to hearing from you.

Saving Your MyiLibrary ebook notes before the Ebook Central Upgrade

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On 21st March all e-books on the Myilibrary platform will move to a new platform called Ebook Central. Unless you save any notes you have made in MyiLibrary ebooks before 21st March you will lose them after the upgrade.

Here’s how to save any notes you have made in MyiLibrary ebooks you have read online (not in books you’ve downloaded).

Step 1: Log in to MyiLibrary.

Step 2: Select My Account at the top of the home page, then select Notes from the drop-down menu. You will see the list of books you have added annotated notes to.

Step 3: Select the titles from which you want to preserve your notes.

Step 4: Choose to either print your notes or email them to yourself. If you choose to email your notes, you will receive an HTML-based message from notes@ingramdigital.com that includes the book titles, the page numbers associated with your notes, and the note titles. Also included will be a link to each note page in MyiLibrary, although these links will not be valid once the Ebook Central upgrade is complete.

For further information contact the library at liaison@sgul.ac.uk or visit the Research Enquiries desk from 11am – 4pm Monday to Friday in the library.

Sign-in to Hunter for more features

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Hunter – the library’s search tool – does more than allow you to search across the Library’s print and electronic resources. You can use Hunter to save useful resources, manage your library account and request items that the library doesn’t hold. All of these features can be activated by signing in to Hunter before you start your search.

Remember: SGUL students and staff should use their SGUL username and password. NHS staff can obtain their login by emailing library@sgul.ac.uk or calling the Library Helpdesk on 020 8725 5466 (between 8am – 6pm Monday to Friday).

Sign-in to:

Check item details
Place holds
Manage your account
Add items to your e-Shelf
Save your searches
Request an inter-library loan

 

Check item details

If you are searching Hunter for a print book, the Locations tab will give you more details about the item’s availability:

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If you want to identify the loan period for each copy (i.e. find out if they are 1 or 3 week loans), click the ‘Sign-in for more options’ link and you’ll be prompted to login:

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Once signed in, you’ll be able to see the loan period for each copy of the book.

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Place holds

If all copies of the book that you want are out on loan, you can place a hold on that book. When a copy becomes available, you will be notified by e-mail to come and collect it from the Library Helpdesk.

The ‘Locations’ tab will tell you if there are any copies available. If all the copies have the status ‘On Loan‘, you’ll need to sign-in to Hunter in order to place a hold on the book. Click the ‘Sign-in for more options‘ link:

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Enter your login details when prompted. Then click the ‘Place Hold‘ link which has now become active:

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Click on the ‘Request’ button to confirm the hold. You’ll then be notified of your place in the Holds queue:

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You can view or cancel your hold requests by using the ‘My Account‘ link in the top right-hand corner of Hunter and clicking on the ‘Requests‘ tab:

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Manage your account

As well as viewing and managing your hold requests (see above) you can use the My Account feature to:

  • View your current loans and check their due dates.
  • Check your account for any outstanding overdue fines.
  • Change the display settings to view more results per page.
  • View your previous loan history.

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You’ll see in the top left two other tabs. These will allow you to save individual search results by adding them to your e-Shelf, and to save useful searches for later.

 

Add items to your e-Shelf

If you find a useful resource when searching Hunter that you want to save for later, click the star next to the title:

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This will turn the star orange and add the item to your e-Shelf.

You can retrieve it, and any other records you have saved, by clicking the e-Shelf link in the top right-hand corner of the page…

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…or by clicking the e-Shelf tab when logged in to your account.

Anything you ‘star’ will be added to this folder. You can manage and organise them (perhaps by topic, or by assignment) into separate folders if you find this useful.

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Save your searches

You can also save a whole page of search results to your e-Shelf in one go. Click the ‘Add page to e-Shelf’ link inn the bottom left hand corner of the page.

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Above that is an option to ‘Save search’. Click on this to save your search terms in your account, so that you can run the search again at a later date. You’ll be prompted to give the search a name:

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You can also save the search as an ‘alert’. When new papers that match your search terms are added to Hunter, you’ll be emailed a list of them to your registered email address.

You can view and manage these searches in the ‘Searches’ tab of your account.

 

Request an inter-library loan

If you are unable to find a book or journal article in our collections, we may be able to obtain a copy for you from a different library*. More details on the inter-library process can be found here: http://library.sgul.ac.uk/resources/interlibrary-loans

You’ll find the online form to request an inter-library loan in the top right-hand corner of Hunter. The link will remain greyed out until you sign-in:

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*charges may apply.
For more help with any of these features, or using Hunter to find resources, please email the Liaison Team on liaison@sgul.ac.uk or visit the Research Enquiries Desk between 11am and 4pm, Monday to Friday.

Changes to downloading e-books from Dawsonera *revised*

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The process for downloading e-books from Dawsonera is changing. You may
have already noticed this change for some Dawsonera e-books and it will
apply to all Dawsonera e-books from 31st October 2017.

From a SGUL desktop computer or laptop

We advise you to use the read online option if you are
using a university computer or library laptop to access Dawsonera e-books.

From your own computer or mobile device

If you want to download a Dawsonera e-book onto your own desktop computer,
laptop, or mobile device, you will need to install free software as
described below.

  • To download Dawsonera e-books to your own desktop or laptop, you will
    need to install Adobe Digital Editions (ADE).
  • To download Dawsonera e-books to an iOS (Apple) or Android device, you
    will need to first download the BlueFire Reader app, which is available from the Apple and Google play stores.
  • How to download ADE or BlueFire Reader and access your Dawsonera e-book:
    1. Create an Adobe ID if you don’t already have one. Visit theAdobe website, click “ Sign in”, then “Get an Adobe ID”. Fill in the online form to sign up for an ID.
    2. Download ADE or BlueFire Reader, and authorise the software with your Adobe ID.
    3. Access the e-book on Dawsonera as normal, and choose to download to
      either Adobe Digital Editions or BlueFire Reader as appropriate.
  • Adobe have also provided this clip on how to create an Adobe ID

MyiLibrary e-books: browser issues

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We’re currently experiencing a problem with MyiLibrary e-books not loading in Firefox.

If you experience an issue with accessing e-books please use Internet Explorer.  Other e-book platforms such as Oxford and DawsonEra are not affected.

Firefox is the default browser on SGUL onsite computers.  You can access Internet Explorer by  clicking on the Windows icon on the task bar and selecting  ‘All Programs’.